Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

My next official Instructure blog post was published today, a brief list of general tips on keeping the design of your online learning simple and usable: Online Course Design: Keep It Super Simple.

I could have gone on for pages on this topic (in fact, I did, for about 2000 words before cutting to around 600). That’s my way of saying there’s plenty of room for exploration and discussion, so go ahead, check it out, and leave a comment.

For all of you who, like me, are intrigued by Instructure Canvas’s open API but just haven’t had a big block of time to play with it, well, just get yourself a browser plug-in that operates as a REST client and you can be up and running in no time. You’ll be surprised at what doors this might open.

1. Install a REST client extension.

Chrome has several great extensions to this end, but so far I like Advanced Rest Client. It lets you save requests and view your history.

For Firefox the most popular REST client is intuitively named RESTClient. Same basic functionality, but with nice tabs to view the output in different ways.

2. Create a Canvas Access Token in your account profile.

The access token will provide a secure key, if you will, to Canvas with all your own unique permissions and enrollments. Most modern web services help you create these to securely talk with other systems.

Login to Canvas, click on your name, and scroll down to Approved Integrations. If you don’t already have a token, click New Access Token.

Give your token a label (purpose) and expiration date (if you want).

Copy that really long string that Canvas generates and paste it into a text document for later reference–you’ll need it to talk to Canvas via your REST client.

3. Pick an API resource or action from the Canvas documentation

Start by going to the Canvas API documentation. Browse through the Authentication page as well as the Resources, which contain all the currently possible the API actions and outputs.

I don’t have a lot of time to get into API calls and REST, but you can think of it as simply a message sent to a server with an authorization method that tells the server how to respond based on the target and the access token. In this case we’re using the GET method. The API calls will simply be HTTPS URLs with the access token appended as a variable. The URL will change based on what data in Canvas you want to access.

For example, if I want to see all of my page view data, I start with the base Canvas HTTPS URL:

I then append the location of the API resource or action:

Be sure to replace :user_id with the numeric value of the user id (or course or account id) you want to access. In this case I want my own. It’s easy to grab this from the end of the URL of my profile page (which happens to be https://canvas.instructure.com/users/123456, so my user id = 123456)

Finally, you’ll need to append your access token as the value of a variable:

So it looks something like this:

This URL is what we’ll feed our REST client in the next step.

4. Run the API through the browser REST client

Open your REST client add-on/extension and paste in the URL customized for the API action you want to perform plus the course/account/user id plus your access token.

Be sure you’re using the right method (typically GET) before clicking send.

You’ll end up with output below. I recommend looking at the JSON formatted response. This data is organized in name/value pairs, but can also contain objects, so a whole lot of data in a very simple format is possible here.

This gives you a glimpse of the possible data exchanges that Canvas makes available via its open API. Your ability to get data will depend upon your role and permissions within Canvas. Obviously student and teacher users will have far less access than admins at any sub-account level.

In real-world practice, you’ll need to know a bit more than this. But the essence is that you’d use any number of scripting languages to request the data from the Canvas API, parse it in JSON format, then do wonderful, magical things–like calculate an individual user’s course progress in order to dynamically generate a badge. Or not.

I’ve just had my first official blog post for Instructure (my new employer–more on that soon) posted on the company blog: Canvas Tastes Like Open. This post explains some of the ways that the Canvas LMS is truly open, and how Instructure has advocated and supported openness since day 1, be that open source, open licensing, open sharing, or open learning experiences.

So check it out and leave a comment there if you can!

I discovered a nice way to create a Quiz in Canvas that associates images or really any multimedia with answer choices.

When creating a Canvas question choose either Fill in Multiple Blanks or Multiple Dropdowns. Multiple Blanks is similar to short answer, and the blanks may need to be manually assessed to provide latitude with spelling etc. Multiple Dropdowns works like matching or multiple choice.

In either of these cases you build the question and the answers in the rich text editor for the question field. Start by introducing the question, e.g. “Match the following constellation images to their names.”

Follow this by one or more images, videos–whatever.

For each of those media items type in the Canvas-standard markup for the blank/dropdown variable name, e.g. [fig1]. It looks something like this:

…where each [fig1] is for a single blank or dropdown choice. Don’t worry–this makes more sense when you’re in the editor!

Then simply use the area below the editor to show the correct answers with feedback.

Voila!

If this works for you, please share some examples.

Instructure Canvas features a pretty powerful Pages tool that allows for rich text editing, quick linking to tools and activities, and embedding multimedia. It does not, unfortunately, support the embedding of RSS or Atom news feeds. Pages strips out your Javascript, too, so there’s no use trying to roll your own feed parser. But there is a work-around: use Feedburner and an IFRAME (more…)

A question came up on the Canvas users list of how one might open an external web site at the same time that a quiz opens. This is possible with Javascript and use of the External URL option in the Canvas Modules (more…)

I’ve been teaching online courses in Instructure Canvas for a while, but stumbled upon a fascinating phenomenon today thanks to one of Canvas’s built in features. This plays out due to a number of system settings, so bear with me (more…)

While UEN is preparing a production-grade instance of the Instructure Canvas learning management system for the Utah System of Higher Education Consortium, we’ve begun a wiki to document Canvas’s features, and to develop faculty and staff training materials. And while my own institution, Utah Valley University, is hosting the wiki, the authoring and maintenance of this wiki is a new, collaborative effort involving most of Utah’s colleges and universities (more…)

…and kicks off with a bangin’ new promo:

A nice homage to Apple--clearly one of Instructure’s design inspirations.

If you didn’t pick it up in the video, this release coincides with Instructure’s announcement that they’ve just opened their source code under the AGPLv3 license.

We just selected Canvas as our State’s LMS here in Utah, and this news only reinforces my opinion that the guys at Instructure are looking a lot farther ahead than anyone else in the LMS business. This isn’t to take any credit away from Moodle, which will always have a special place in my open source heart, but, well, if you haven’t tested Canvas--from either a “traditional” LMS or un-LMS perspective--it’s pretty easy to hop in and give it a test drive.

And now my Canvas package download is done. Expect some installation notes later on.

Instructure Canvas allows teachers to record video from a web cam directly into course pages, discussion posts or even as assignment feedback. It occurred to me that I can easily record my desktop activity instead of my web cam using a similar set-up to what I’ve used to live-stream conference presentations. A 3rd-party desktop app allows you to delineate video sources in place of the web cam, including the user’s desktop. While I still use the commercial software WebcamMax, this time I tested a free software called ManyCam (more…)